Quotes from George Eliot

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of divine power against evil- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle woth darkness narrower.

Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.

Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions.

Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.

My life is too short, and God's work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world.

Our deeds determine us, as long as we determine our deeds

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.

Dorothea, he said to himself, was for ever enthroned in his soul: no other woman could sit higher than her footstool...

Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbors' lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.